Instructions: Essays must incorporate at least four different terms from the attached list (listed down below) and must cite at least four separate readings and lectures. You just incorporate both relevant lectures and course readings in each essay—not one or the other. It can be 2 powerpoints & 2 readings or 1 powerpoint and 3 readings for example. You may cite class lectures by the week and power point slides. You must use readings and lectures from the second half of the semester. Although the given sources seem overwhelming it is not necessary to read everything bit by bit, it is to just help you to get the best knowledge and strong evidence.
1) Read the prompts carefully. Make sure that you address and answer all parts of the writing assignment.
2) Include an introduction with a clear thesis statement, body paragraphs with supporting evidence (properly cited), and a conclusion.
3) Essay must include at least four separate readings and lectures (either 3 of one type and one of the other, or two of each type). CITE these sources when you use them. It is not recommended that you use outside readings. Should you do so, however, you must provide full citations of the source (author, title, publisher, year, pages cited). When citing powerpoints, cite it by the week number and powerpoint name for example: (Week 11, Red Summer 1919).
4) You must include 4 terms from the attached list in the essay. Each term will count only once towards the total of 8 required terms. Please highlight the terms when you use them (either underlined, bold, or italics).
Review the following quotation:
“The kitchenette is the author of the glad tidings that new suckers are in town, ready to be cheated, plundered, and put in their place.
The kitchenette is our prison, our death sentence without a trial, the new form of mob violence that assaults not only the lone individual, but all of us, in its ceaseless attacks.
The kitchenette, with its filth and foul air, with its one toilet for thirty or more tenants, kills our black babies so fast that in many cities twice as many of them die as white
babies.
The kitchenette is the seedbed for scarlet fever, dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis,
gonorrhea, syphilis, pneumonia, and malnutrition.
The kitchenette scatters death so widely among us that our death rate exceeds our
birth rate, and if it were not for the trains and autos bringing us daily into the city from the plantations, we black folks who dwell in northern cities would die out entirely over the course of a few years …
The kitchenette is the funnel through which our pulverized lives flow to ruin and death on the city pavements, at a profit.”
– Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (1941)
FIRST ESSAY QUESTION: Drawing on the quote above, describe the conditions facing African American migrants to the urban North? How was life in the North similar to life in the South? How do these aspects of life in the North point to the existence of the “color line” outside of the South? How was life in the North different from life in the South? How were these aspects of life in the North impacted not just by issues of race and class, but also gender? Lastly, describe the contributions of an individual and/or organization that took up the strategy of agitation to challenge the circumstances that African Americans faced in the North.
FIRST ESSAY KEY TERMS:
Great Migration
“Promised Land”
“Black Belt” communities
Overcrowded neighborhoods
Industrial jobs
Employment discrimination
“Bosses of the buildings”
Kitchenette apartment
Color line
De jure segregation
Home Owners Loan Corporation
Redlining
Infant mortality
Restrictive covenants
Mob violence
“triply anchored and restricted”
SECOND ESSAY QUESTION: What was sharecropping? How did it reflect both a compromise between the needs of landless freedmen and Southern landowners, as well as the relative lack of power that freedmen and their families held during the years that followed the end of Reconstruction? How does Nate Shaw describe the experience of sharecropping? How does Shaw’s description reflect the realities of life under Jim Crow? In answering this question, describe three factors that made sharecropping an increasingly difficult livelihood during the early 20th century. Lastly, what were at least two strategies that African Americans used to respond to those increasingly difficult circumstances?
SECOND ESSAY Key Terms (BOLD THESE IN WRITING):
Reconstruction
Land redistribution Freedmen/freedwomen Autonomy
Landowner Compromise
“Share” system “working on halves” Fertilizer
Debt
Exploitation
Poor quality of land Cotton price
Boll weevil
“joint note”